Erx pointed up at the aircraft and told the officer: “Ask him.”
26
It all started with the dream.
On the first night aboard his ship, the AeroVox, during the first decent piece of slumber Hunter had had in weeks, a dream came to him vividly and real. He was above a beautiful countryside. Below he could see rivers, trees, golden fields that stretched for miles. Sometimes he would soar over small towns and even smaller villages. He could see people below, moving about, talking, laughing, living their lives, either unaware that he was above them or seeing him but not caring.
In his dream, he flew over this idyllic landscape — flying without his flying machine. No extending of arms as if they were wings. No noise. No means of forward propulsion. Just flying. He could see all this, smell it, even feel it, as clear as day. These were things like nothing he’d seen on Earth, but not completely different either; they were foreign, yet familiar.
It was a magnificent dream to have, especially while flying in the stark beauty of Supertime, heading for the Outer Fringe. But the dream had a catch: Whenever he was in it, Hunter could not stop flying. The dream did not provide him with a hover mode. He had to keep moving, relishing the vision below, but never being able to stop and touch it. Never able to put his feet on the ground.
He came to realize, after having the strange dream every night for the first month the journey Outward, that this place he was flying over must have been his home.
The more times Hunter had the dream, the more elaborate it became.
Every once and a while he’d spot a flag down below that looked just like the one in his pocket.
Sometimes he thought he even saw the girl whose picture he carried with him. Blond, beautiful, she always seemed to be running through a field in slow motion. But again this blessing was a curse. Hunter never could stop long enough to see if the colors and patterns of the flag on the ground were exactly the same as the one in his pocket. He never could stop long enough to see if the girl running in slow motion through the field was the same girl in his faded photograph.
All he could do was look — and fly on.
Still, Hunter came to have a strange appreciation of the dream. Some nights he looked forward to having it. Some nights he went to his quarters early just so he could have it. It evolved to a point where he was sometimes able to slow his speed down to a crawl, almost a hover, and get to within a few feet of the surface.
But anytime he would try to touch the ground, he would suddenly find himself awake.
Then one night, the recurring dream took a very strange turn. He was flying as usual when he spotted the flag flying near the top of a pole in a small town square. And this time, when he tried to hover, he found he was actually able to stop. And when he tried to get close to the surface, he found he was actually able to land.
And upon touching his feet to the ground, he felt the same electric jolt as when he first stepped on Earth.
In the dream he ran up to the flagpole to find an elderly man hoisting up a multicolored ensign. This flag was exactly like the one Hunter carried in his pocket, exactly like the symbol he’d seen on the side of the failed Mars polar lander. Yet it was stained with blood.
And the man at the pole?
It was Calandrx.
“Am I finally home, my brother?” Hunter asked him.
Calandrx just smiled.
“You are very close,” he replied. “But she can tell you more.”
Hunter turned to see a blond girl running toward him from a nearby field. He resisted the temptation to run toward her and lift her up in a slow-motion embrace. Instead he studied her closely as she ran toward him. Yes, she had blond hair. Yes, she was beautiful.
But she was not the person whose picture he carried in his pocket. In fact, he knew who she was.
It was Xara.
She reached him, looked up at him, smiled, and hugged him tightly. He hugged her back.
Then she whispered in his ear: “The lighthouse is on the last place anyone can be…”
She laughed. Calandrx laughed. But when Hunter started to ask her for more information, she kissed him… and then he woke up.
The dream stopped coming to him after that.
Hunter and his crew reached the Fifth Arm of the Outer Fringe and wandered its vast expanse for the next five months.
He went about his mission of reclaiming planets for the Fourth Empire, but always with the ulterior motive of finding the lighthouse not very far from his mind. In that time, the AeroVox rediscovered sixteen new star systems and sixty-eight new worlds. With each new planet he popped into, either covertly or like a bolt from the blue, Hunter tried to feel the kinship bond with the inhabitants that seemed to be promised in the war poem. But though many of the people he met were gracious, hospitable, and friendly — that is, after they realized they were, in essence, being invaded from outer space — none of them looked like him, talked like him, or was anything at all similar to him. Without the dream to count on, it made for some long nights.
In that time, though, whenever they had a chance, Hunter, Erx, and Berx would pore over the ancient map, sometimes for hours on end, trying to translate more closely the sketchy, two-thousand-year-old data. All three had reread the war poem many times as well, trying to appreciate any subtleties they might have missed. They came to the conclusion that the lighthouse probably wasn’t a “house” as would normally be thought of, or some entity that somehow was made entirely of light. According to the best translation they could come up with, the lighthouse seemed to be more of a beacon, something to call “the lost souls” home. It was probably an automated device, constructed hundreds if not thousands of years before it struck the base of the Mars polar lander. There also was a good chance that it was no longer operating; one line in the poem suggested it had been shut down centuries before. This, too, could make Hunter’s nights seem endless.
Still his mission went on; he continued doing the job he’d been sent out here to do. They followed the reclamation list drawn up by the X-Forces high command, and for the most part, the AeroVox found and visited the planets on this list and more or less stuck to the timetable that went along with it. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was not. Many sectors in this part of the Outer Fringe, Fifth Arm, had not seen any Empire presence since the last Dark Age. Some people out here knew of the Empire only by word of mouth or rumors; others accepted it as fact. Still others didn’t even know space travel was possible or that the stars above them were inhabited and the Galaxy was teeming with life.
It was a strange time then. Hunter’s job during these months was essentially to be the first visitor from outer space some of these planets had seen in thousands of years. What an odd profession, to be the first “alien” to visit a world in several millennia. Sometimes the population reacted positively; sometimes not.
The whole Empire-returning thing went so much easier when the populace had an inkling that they were not alone in the universe. Past contact that survived in history, or even crashed ships from previous empires, or even the early part of this one, could all soften the blow when the AeroVox suddenly appeared in orbit around their world.
In all, they been forced to intervene in three major wars and a handful of smaller ones. These campaigns rarely lasted more than a day or two after the AeroVox arrived, though.